LEGEND OF BILLY BOCK LIVES ON IN SPIRIT OF GOOD GUYS LIKE TORII HUNTER

By Sam Krebs/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

OFTENTIMES the legend’s better than the real story.

Of all the campfire tale teases I brought you last week, I just promised you stories.

Never said they were true.

You can make up your own mind. Challenge me if you will.

In the 2003 movie “Big Fish,” director Tim Burton spun a series of marvelous tales told by a father (Albert Finney) who was away a lot in order to stay closer to his son.

As the son (Billy Crudup) grew older, the tales got wilder and more incredulous until he finally just stopped believing and made out his old man to be just a good liar.

Then the young man takes a series of journeys that open his eyes wider to the fact that the old man just might not be lying after all.

So it will be here.

In the spirit of the baseball playoffs, where Pine Bluff’s Torii Hunter and the Angels are trying to stay alive in the American League divisional playoffs, I’ll start you this week with a Billy Bock story. Legend or lie?

You folks in Pine Bluff know Bock as the city’s greatest high school baseball coach in guiding a bona fide future major leaguer in Hunter, but what you might not know is that Billy was also a pretty fair football coach at Sylvan Hills.

At the Sherwood school, he mentored another future major leaguer in Kevin McReynolds, who went on to the UA and some stellar seasons with the San Diego Padres.

But as a football coach, Bock was known a motivator. No matter what he had to do to get the job done.

THE LATE Kim Brazzel, whom I worked with at the Arkansas Democrat before he went on to much more fame and fortune at the Gazette, used to tell this Bock story. Might be just a good legend, but if you knew Bock as I did, one wouldn’t doubt it to be true.

Seems Bill had to find a way to get his team fired up for what may have been a homecoming battle against the Bears’ Pulaski County rivals Mills, and needed a way to get them mad at the Comets.

Legend has it Bock got a hold of an old dog, quite possibly from a nearby pound. This mutt had seen better days, full of mange spots and just not long for this world. Billy bandaged the wounds, and presented the evidence of foul play to his team.

“Look what them mean boys from Mills did to my dog,” he was said to have told his team. “This is my kids’ favorite dog.”

The legend says there were almost tears in his eyes.

Whatever he said, or did, must have worked. Sylvan Hills throttled Mills something like 39-0.

True or not, it makes a good story. However, I must admit I saw something like that in the Steven Spielberg-Kurt Russell comedy “Used Cars” where the unscrupulous salesman would trick the test-drive victim into thinking he ran over the salesman’s dog, specially trained to sneak under the vehicle and play dead.

So instead of knowing the Bock story to be true, Brazzel, a practical joker of the first degree and an intense poker player (“here’s a hot seat for a cold butt”), might have seen it on HBO.

No doubt you folks, especially those who played for Bock, have some better stories. Feel free to share.

I DO KNOW one that’s true. When we were growing up in Fort Smith, where at the time Bock was the successful coach at St. Anne’s Academy, my dad served in the Air National Guard with Bill.

One day my dad came home with three brand-new Brooks Robinson baseball gloves, Rawlings brand, for me and my twin brothers. Dad said he got them from Billy, who we only really knew as our North T Street neighbor. Occasionally we’d see him chasing his small kids up the street to bring them back home.

But I know I loved that Rawlings glove. And later, as I came to know Billy through the media and his coaching stops not only here in Pine Bluff and in the Little Rock area at Sherwood, but also at Arkadelphia and Texarkana, I knew there was more to “Billy Ball” than met the eye. When he and football legend Sporty Carpenter got together at Henderson State, they could spin some yarns. True or not.

The man could motivate. If you played for him, you know that.

And like Torii Hunter, you became a better man because of it.